This report investigates the uses of the ergative case marker in transitive clauses in Bumthang, a language of Central Bhutan. We discuss the conditions under which the ergative is required and show that a simple analysis involving multiple influences models the data. Previous studies have shown that variable case marking may be determined by syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic factors, but in Bumthang we see that ALL of these factors play a role in determining the use of the ergative case marker. We hope that our analysis will prove useful for understanding the variable uses of the ergative case marker in Himalayan and other languages as well as providing interesting challenges for formal models of case marking.

We conducted an artificial language learning experiment to study learning asymmetries that might reveal latent preferences relating to, and any dependencies between, the edge aligmnent and quantity sensitivity (QS) parameters in stress patterning. We used a poverty of the stimulus approach to teach American English speakers an unbounded QS stress rule (stress a single CV: syllable) and either a left- or right-aligning QI rule if only light syllables were present. Forms with two CV: syllables were withheld in the learning phase and added in the test phase, forcing participants to choose between left- and right-aligning options for the QS rule. Participants learned the left- and right-edge QI rules equally well, and also the basic QS rule. Response patterns for words with two CV: syllables suggest biases favoring a left-aligning QS rule with a left-edge QI default. Our results also suggest that a left-aligning QS pattern with a right-edge QI default was least favored. We argue that stress patterns shown to be preferred based on evidence from ease-of-learning and participants’ untrained generalizations can be considered more natural than less favored opposing patterns. We suggest that cognitive biases revealed by artificial stress learning studies may have contributed to shaping stress typology.

There are often practical barriers to doing fieldwork in a novel, remote location. I propose a model for linguistic research designed to overcome such barriers: a linguistic field station. It is a centralized facility that coordinates scientific research by providing (i) research infrastructure, (ii) access to specific social, biological, or ecological systems that are not immediately available otherwise, (iii) training for students at the graduate and undergraduate levels, and (iv) access to local communities with the goal of obtaining data from them as well as training local specialists. Field stations are particularly important for research on and documentation of Indigenous languages, including contexts where colonial languages are supplanting Indigenous ones. Although the field station model is not new in research outside of language sciences, it has not yet been utilized widely in language research. I describe how the proposed model has been implemented in Guatemala and compare the field station there with other linguistic field stations.

Evidence from main and lesser-known Romance languages indicates that the morphosyntactic properties of existential pivots correlate with semantic and pragmatic properties of noun phrases that count toward subjecthood to different degrees crosslinguistically. While fully supporting Beaver and colleagues’ (2005) theory of the definiteness effects, the findings of this research also suggest that the effects cannot be fully explained in a nonconstructional way.

This article argues that morpheme syncretism can arise as a result of structural and functional changes that display features of a grammaticalization process. Our claim is based on a case study analyzing the functional evolution of -jez, the third singular possessive agreement morpheme of Udmurt, which appears to function as a nominalizer, to mark contrast, to function as a kind of definite determiner, and to mark accusative case. We argue that these seemingly different roles are instantiations of three major functions: cross-referencing a possessor, encoding partitivity, and marking specific objects, which, in turn, represent subsequent stages of a grammaticalization path. Evidence for the hypothesized changes is provided by parallel developments in the sister languages, primarily Hungarian, the sister language with the longest-documented history.

In their target article, Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz (2020) have challenged linguists to constructively engage with race and racism. They suggest three core principles for inclusion and equity in linguistics: (i) ‘social impact’ as a core criterion for excellence; (ii) the acknowledgment of our field's ‘origins as a tool of colonialism and conquest’; and (iii) the elimination of the ‘race gap’ that ‘diminishes the entire field … by excluding scholars and students of color’. Here I amplify Charity Hudley et al.'s challenges through some of my own critiques of Creole studies. These critiques serve to further analyze institutional whiteness as, in their terms, ‘a structuring force in academia, informing the development of theories, methods, and models in ways that reproduce racism and white supremacy'. The latter is exceptionally overt in the prejudicial misrepresentations (a.k.a. ‘Creole exceptionalism') that we linguists have created and transmitted, since the colonial era, about Creole languages and their speakers. One such misrepresentation, whose popularity trumps its dubious historical and empirical foundations, starts with the postulation that Creole languages as a class contrast with so-called ‘regular’ languages due to allegedly ‘abnormal’ processes of emergence and transmission. In effect, then, Creole studies may well be the most spectacular case of exclusion and marginalization in linguistics. With this in mind, I ask of Charity Hudley et al. a key question that is inspired by legal scholar Derrick Bell's ‘racial interest-convergence theory’, whereby those in power will actively work in favor of racial justice only when such work also contributes to their self-interest. Given this theory, how can we sustainably implement any agenda, including Charity Hudley et al.'s, that stands to undermine the ‘structuring power of white supremacy', including the power to choose whose research gets funded or whose subfield is included in ‘core’ linguistics? Bell's theory might also bear on my proposed funder principle for the intellectual history of Creole studies. I suggest that it is out of self-interest that the European funders of the colonial enterprise in Africa and the Americas helped create the power-knowledge structuring force that accounts for the genesis and transmission of Creole exceptionalism through centuries—in spite of mounting evidence against it. I end with an optimistic note about what might constitute ‘success’ in linguistics.

Fifty cases of sound-symbolic expressive palatalization were collected in a typological survey of babytalk registers, diminutive constructions, and other sound-symbolic systems. Analysis of the typological trends and language-particular examples reveals important differences between expressive palatalization and phonologically motivated palatalization. To account for expressive palatalization, we propose a novel set of EXPRESS(X) constraints in OPTIMALITY THEORY. The integration of the EXPRESS(X) constraints with the rest of phonology is shown to explain the typological differences between expressive and phonological palatalization, account for the phonological extension of expressive palatalization, and constitute a general theoretical framework for sound-symbolic phonological patterns.

This paper is a reply to Benjamin Bruening's article ‘The lexicalist hypothesis: Both wrong and superfluous’, which appears in this volume of Language. Bruening claims that all phenomena that have been explained with reference to the notion word should be explained with reference to the X0/XP distinction. He claims that only phrases can be extracted, which would explain the island status of words (his X0). He also claims that coordination always affects full XPs, countering an earlier argument by Steve Wechsler and me. He argues for a phrasal analysis of resultative constructions and tries to support it by the claim that all arguments of nouns are optional, and hence a lexical analysis of resultative constructions that assumes that the result predicate is selected by the verb would make wrong claims when it comes to nominalizations, since one would expect that the result predicate can be omitted like other arguments in nominalizations can be.

I argue that Bruening's X0/XP distinction cannot explain extraction differences since X0 can be extracted, that some arguments are indeed not optional in nominalizations, and that coordination may affect lexical items. I furthermore point out that morphological phenomena in languages other than English may need more machinery and different tools and that in the end it may be reasonable to assume that there is a morphology that is indeed different from syntax.

We compare the complexity of idiosyncratic sound patterns involving American English /ɹ/ with the relative simplicity of clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns found in English and other languages. For /ɹ/, we report an ultrasound-based articulatory study of twenty-seven speakers of American English. Two speakers use only retroflex /ɹ/, sixteen use only bunched /ɹ/, and nine use both /ɹ/ types, with idiosyncratic allophonic distributions. These allophony patterns are covert, because the difference between bunched and retroflex /ɹ/ is not readily perceived by listeners. We compare this typology of /ɹ/-allophony patterns to clear/dark /l/-allophony patterns in seventeen languages. On the basis of the observed patterns, we show that individual-level /ɹ/ allophony and language-level /ɹ/ allophony exhibit similar phonetic grounding, but that /ɹ/-allophony patterns are considerably more complex. The low complexity of language-level /l/-allophony patterns, which are more readily perceived by listeners, is argued to be the result of individual-level contact in the development of sound patterns. More generally, we argue that familiar phonological patterns (which are relatively simple and homogeneous within communities) may arise from individual-level articulatory patterns, which may be complex and speaker-specific, by a process of koineization. We conclude that two classic properties of phonological rules, phonetic naturalness and simplicity, arise from different sources.

We explore children's use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb's meaning.

Subjunctives are typically used in intensional, or modal, contexts to talk about possible worlds, but they can also be licensed in negative contexts. While prior work has sought to unify these ‘polarity’ subjunctives with ‘intensional’ subjunctives, in this article I build a case that they represent, in German and Russian at least, a distinct use as negative polarity items (NPIs). This usage fills a gap in the typology of NPIs: unlike known items such as any or ever, which are taken to activate alternatives consisting of individuals, eventualities, or times, these items activate alternatives consisting of worlds.

The regularity of sound change as set out by the scholars of the late nineteenth century is a fundamental principle of historical linguistics. The principle as recognized by the Neogrammarian linguists states that once a sound change has begun, it affects every word in the vocabulary that contains the sound in question. The principle has been disputed by many linguists and especially dialectologists, who argue that ‘every word has its own history’. This article demonstrates how the Neogrammarian principle operates in one prototypical change in progress, the raising of the mid front long vowel /ey/ before a consonant in Philadelphia English. Mixed-level regression analysis shows consistent phonetic constraints across the nineteenth century, with no effect of word frequency. The regularity of sound change is reflected in the common pattern of behavior of the most frequent words, those of moderate frequency, and words that occur only once in the corpus.